GIBBON, Edward.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Miscellaneous Works. First continental edition, following the original London publication by Cadell & Davies earlier that year. The work includes the first appearance of Gibbon's autobiography, titled the Memoirs of My Life, which created the image of Gibbon which so fascinated the 19th century. Gibbon died in 1794, leaving his papers to John Baker Holroyd, Lord Sheffield (1735-1821), then serving on the Board of Agriculture. Sheffield faced a monumental task, not least in collating six different manuscripts of the Memoirs into one. Besides the autobiography, Sheffield's edition collects much of Gibbon's correspondence, several of his essays (including one defending his arguments in the Decline and Fall), and extracts from his journal. J. J. Tourneisen specialized in producing pirated versions of British and Scottish Enlightenment works for the continental market. Provenance: Georg Heinrich Thommen (1908-1956), a Swiss journalist, with his blue ink stamp on the front free endpaper of each volume. That of Volume I also carries the inscription "To my dear friend dr. Rudolf Frowe. Xmas 1941. Heinrich Thommen."

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